That was meant to refer to Harborwolf
Right, then. From the Washington Post, quoting the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference after their semi-annual meeting in 2001:
Not only stating that condoms are ineffective, but to blame for the spread of HIV/AIDS. This is the stated position of the Catholic authorities representing the countries hardest hit by the AIDS virus. Can we please put this one to bed now, or are you going to try and trip me up on “may”?
Of course, I realise this is going to devolve into a semantic pissing match about the word “utterly” that you snuck in there, whereby I am going to be called upon to find a quote in which condoms are explicitly stated to have a 0% success rate. Well, no, I’m not going to. This would be a ludicrous standard, and when we have Cardinals describing using condoms as like “playing Russian Roulette”, and Bishops insisting that condoms be distributed with warning labels like cigarettes (see cites passim), it is more than plain that the Church is acting in many instances with blatant intellectual dishonesty. Condoms are, despite not being perfect, extremely effective as a barrier to disease. You don’t have to claim that they are completely ineffective to be lying about their efficacy.
I don’t think you can assume that without examining the evidence.
If you mean African-American women vs. everybody else, I don’t think you can assume that “both groups are heterosexual” either. Just the opposite, in fact - I expect the primary difference between HIV+ A-A women and other cases of HIV is how they acquired the virus. I would expect IV drug use to be heavily over-represented in A-A women with HIV as compared to everyone else with HIV. Thus the “factor other than sexuality” would tend to apply mostly to this subset, and not to HIV as it is commonly acquired.
Maybe I don’t understand your point. If you are saying that women tend to get AIDS in different ways than men, true but not quite germane. Because [list=A][li]Men are much more at risk for AIDS in American Race is more a proxy for the already recognized risk factors than a factor in itself.[/list][/li]
Well, of course you are right that the mantra of “safer sex” has been repeated on a daily and hourly basis for the last twenty years or so. But I don’t think this accounts for the lack of an explosion in AIDS cases transmitted by what I am defining as heterosexuality - heterosexual intercourse that passes from female to male and back. Very often, when people speak of “heterosexual AIDS cases” in America they are including other kinds of transmission besides intercourse - mostly sharing needles, mother-to-child transmits, hemophilia, blood transfusions, and so forth. This is not what I mean.
Certainly there are cases of women contracting HIV from their infected male partners without themselves using needles. But the difficulties of female-to-male transmission tend to interrupt the spread at that point. Even a HIV+ female who has a high number of sexual partners tends not to spread the infection nearly as much as an HIV+ male having anal intercourse with the same number of men.
(The Master speaks- let lesser mortals keep silence.)
So my contention is that the intrinsic barriers to female-to-male transmission primarily account for the fact that AIDS in America continues to be confined largely although not exclusively to gay men, IV drug abusers, and their sexual partners, and has not exploded to the general populace.
I’ll have a look - thanks.
Regards,
Shodan
There’s a point that I think may need to be said here… it seems to be fairly important in understanding the Church’s attitude on this one.
(I’m simplifying to beat the band here… and I don’t believe things work this way either.)
From what I understand, the Church views earthly life as a proving ground, more or less, for a person’s soul. In other words, if you live correctly, accept Christ, avoid sin, get forgiven those you do commit, etc… then you’re good- going to Heaven and all.
If not, then you go to hell or purgatory, and are screwed.
At no point in this whole thing is the length or comfort of your earthly tenure really considered by the Church. Look at all the martyrs who died young and horribly at the hands of infidels, or whatever the Church called them.
From the Church’s standpoint, they’re taking the LONG TERM view- yeah, if you follow our teachings, you may die early and horribly, but you’re good for eternity. Disobey, and you may have 50-100 years of earthly fun, but then look where you end up.
Not a completely unreasonable viewpoint when it’s coming from religious leaders who believe for all they’re worth that there is life after death.
I really don’t agree that safe sex education is not responsible for the (relative) containment of HIV in our society (see later), and I’m not sure your second representation of “heterosexual AIDS cases” is an accurate representation of what people mean when they say it - I think the distinction between sexually transmitted HIV and the other kinds is clear.
I don’t like dismissing cites on the basis of age, but that column is from 1988, and even then Cecil refers to the numbers as “old” and “pretty much guesswork”. According to this from Yale’s med dept (warning: powerpoint presentation, yuck), in unprotected m/f sex there is on average one transmission of HIV per 600 events (where one partner is infected), compared to one every 200 for the comparable m/m sexual event. So it’s only three times more likely to be transmitted by gay unprotected sex than it is by hetero unprotected sex. Consider that there are anywhere between 5 and 20 times as many straight people than there are gay people, and it seems to me that heterosexual sex could reasonably be expected to be the main mode of transmission. And again, while IV drug usage may be more dangerous per event, the sheer number of people having straight sex overwhelms the number of people sharing needles by a positively huge margin. Thankfully, the other modes of transmission are extremely rare in our modernised health systems.
Something has therefore prevented an explosion of AIDS in the heterosexual community, and it doesn’t seem to be the simple mechanics. Since the highest risk activity is IV drug usage, which is unrelated to sexual preference, it stands to reason that HIV has just as good a potential entry point into the straight population as it does the gay one. Again, while the individual probability of transmission per sexual event is three times lower, the sheer number of sexual events taking place should compensate. But it doesn’t appear that way, and since we’ve factored out the numbers, something else must be left. I believe it’s sex-ed, although I acknowledge that we then have to address why it hasn’t helped the gay community. I would guess that this is at least in part because sex-ed tends to be targeted at straight sex, but I don’t really have anything to back this up, not having been through the US school system myself.
Given the numbers above, and the relative probabilities of transmission, I don’t really think this is supportable. As that article I linked to discussed, there are factors in Africa that greatly increase the probability of transmission in heterosexual contact, and cultural norms that increase and reinforce the sexual networking effects that allow the disease to spread, even within the confines of normal sexual relationships.
To me, all of this indicates that there is indeed a huge risk coming from heterosexual sex, and that this risk must be combatted. Getting back to the Church, even if we assume that it is being honest about condoms, its policy of entirely discouraging their use is at best highly irresponsible, fed by wishful thinking of the very worst kind. It’s simply impossible to believe that abstinence will ever prevail, as it goes against one of the most basic human instincts. By all means, let the Church promote abstinence and fidelity as their primary means of protection. But the moral baseline for me would be for them to acknowledge that condoms provide protection as well, and for them to allow married couples to use them*. The Church has to acknowledge that extra-marital sex does occur, and while not condoning it, it should not actively campaign against steps to make it safer. I don’t believe it’s acceptable for an organisation with as much power as it has to stick its head in the sand and pretend that everything will be alright if we just stop having sex. If you’ve got that much power, a complete avoidance of pragmatism is a moral failure in itself.
(* this question is not as cut-and-dried as earlier suggested, and is still a matter of great debate in the Church - the official position remains that they are forbidden, although one of the Pope’s favoured theologians came out with a statement late last year that by viewing condoms as preventing transmission of death rather than transmission of life, they might be viewed as acceptable. But these are only the first small noises of a move, and don’t represent a complete shift yet…)
It’s a whole horrible mess.
The Catholic Church isn’t helping, but it’s not totally to blame.
I’ve seen some of the things talked about in this thread in India, where the RCC has little influence.
There I’ve met women widowed by AIDS, contracted from their truck-driver husbands, who in turn contracted the disease from prostitutes. These women were simply not in a position where they were able to insist that their husband used condoms.
In some cases they were unaware of his condition, in others the idea that a woman could insist on protected sex is unrealisitic and naive. In those circumstances, we would see it as rape, and they would see it as a wife making unreasonable demands, which her husband refused to submit to.
I’ve seen women bringing their dying babies to the clinic, where everyone knew the cause was AIDS, but no-one would say it. I met families where the widow’s in-laws would only support (I mean literally feed, house and clothe her and her children) her if the family’s honour was not tainted with the stigma of AIDS.
The saddest women were those who had been disowned by their in-laws and thrown out onto the streets, simply because they had decided to be honest about the condition, and to have themselves and their children tested and treated.
Ignorance breeds fear and increases the stigma. If can’t prevent people from engaging in harmful behaviour (and you can’t) you must do everything in your power to reduce the harm from their actions.
That means empowering women so that they can insist that their partner uses a condom. It means ensuring that men use condoms. It means that people are tested and treated, as a decreased viral load will not only prolong their life, but reduce their likelihood of infecting others.
In my view, the RCC is not interested in harm reduction, only in harm prevention…sadly much of the harm has already been done and it’s too late to rely solely on that strategy. The sooner the Church realises that, the better.
The only article I can find is:
AIDS Challenges Religious Leaders; Opposition to Condoms Is Criticized; [FINAL Edition]
Byline: Karen DeYoung. The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: Aug 13, 2001. pg. A.01
Is that the article? I can’t find the quote you mention in the article.
I found it.
Here’s the complete quote, without the ellipses that you used:
That’s a bit different spin, eh?
From your edited quote, it appeared to me the Bishops were saying: “…[C]ondoms may even be one of the main reasons for the spread of HIV-AIDS.”
That’s a rather remarkable statement.
What they were actually saying, and which you edited out: By undermining abstinence and marital fidelity, condoms may even be one of the main reasons for the spread of HIV-AIDS.
That, to me, reads more like a philosophical statement – that is, condoms, as part of the general trend of devaluing chaste and faithful behavior, cause a culture that is more apt to include promiscuity and faithless sexual behavior – which, in turn, are fertile ground for the spread of AIDS.
I don’t read that line as saying: condoms spread AIDS directly. They are saying, rather, that in a culture in which abstinence and marital fidelity are not valued, AIDS will gain a foothold more easily – and the widespread distribution of condoms contribute to such a culture.
Bricker C’mon man. I mean c’mon.
I have posted my opinion in the past, that religion, having been around from the begining of human history, is the cause of many of the worlds ills. People have told me that I can not make such a general statement. I respond by pointing out elements that I see having been negative. They respond, I defend, it just goes in a circle.
In the same way, saying that condoms devalue “abstinence and marital fidelity” is the same thing. Infidelity was around when the church was a major world power.
Bricker is dead-on.
When condoms are used effectively, they are upwards of 98% effective. I can drag out cites for this, but I think we can all accept that as a valid number.
The problem is when they are used ineffectively or incorrectly.
Then, my immoral, fornicating, uneducated friends, it becomes a whole 'nother ballgame.
I hate to say this, but handing someone a condom and saying “now, you’re OK” or putting a bowl of the damn things outside your door, or making them available on every streetcorner is NOT the solution.
In fact, the invulnerability complex that goes with having a supply of condoms is likely to cause more risky behavior, because our newly-equipped fornicators think that all their bases are covered. This is the point that the Church is trying to make. And it is a valid one.
Let’s tie this all back into the OP. You may not like what some are saying here. You may not agree with the position of the Catholic Church. But nobody ever got a sexually-transmitted case of AIDS by living a chaste Christian life and surrounding themselves with those that do likewise.
Have you completely,willfully ignored the words, “education” spread through out this thread? :dubious:
Yes, it was. Only now there are bigger consequences than bastardy and syphilis, and the Church is still sitting on the only guaranteed way to avoid those consequences.
One might even ask how high the stakes have to get before people start paying attention.
And forget the Church for a minute and think pragmatically: people are DYING because they can’t keep it in their pants.
How rancid does meat have to get before people stop eating it?
Scott_plaid, are you talking to me here?
I addressed the idea of education in the OP, for crying out loud.
Do you expect the Catholic Church to educate people in the safest way to break its commandments?
Come on, now.
Bricker: full text at this page; I can’t seem to get at the article through WaPo’s site. My link has the quote in the first paragraph. Man, I miss being at the Beeb and having LexisNexis.
Oh, preview, you’ve found it; do you have a link for that? And I’ll thank you not to accuse me of selectively quoting, since the actual bishops’ quotes we posted (y’know, the bits in quote marks) are identical. The words “By undermining abstinence and marital fidelity” are not part of the Bishops’ statement, but are part of the article you’re quoting. If you check out the version I had available, you will see that those words do not appear. I don’t know if you’re looking at a different article, or a different edition.
You’re still ignoring the “Russian Roulette” comments, and the demands for warning labels, too. Seriously, I don’t see what you’re getting out of this. The Panorama program you so hastily dismissed earlier included primary footage of Catholic nuns urging HIV+ parishioners not to use condoms at home with their wives. Pamphlets were distributed in Kenya propagating bullshit about HIV passing through pores in latex. We can parse the minutiae of public statements all day, the plain fact of the matter is that the Catholic Church as a matter of policy deliberately downplays the effectiveness of condoms in order to discourage their use, as a means of furthering their religious conviction that they are immoral. While I disagree with the religious conviction, I can respect it, more or less. I can’t respect their underhand methods of going about upholding it, and I can’t see how anyone can deny that the Church is being less than honest about the matter.
So gee, Pup, what’s the solution? Tell everyone they’re no good and they should just not have sex, or EDUCATE THEM ON HOW TO USE THE FUCKING THINGS PROPERLY? Your deliberately retarded characterisation of the condom effort is not what aid agencies want, they want the Catholic Church to stop charging around like a bull in a china shop spreading bullshit fucking lies about condoms’ efficacy. We want to educate people on how to use condoms, and we’d really appreciate it if the Catholic Church would stop shitting all over everyone’s efforts to do so. Is this plain enough yet? I don’t really expect the Catholic Church to go running around singing the praises of condoms, but I’d be really grateful if they’d a) stop lying about them, and b) come to the conclusion that they are not intrinsically evil. Blaming condoms for infidelity is rather like blaming guns for murder, n’est ce pas? After all, it’s pretty plainly the case that infidelity is happening in Africa without condoms - that’s the whole bloody problem.
** Happy Scrappy Hero Pup** So then if you go out to at your parents house and get food posioning it’s YOUR fault? Sure if it happens more than once, okay, maybe you ought to help your mom with the cooking.
We’re not talking about bad meat or an inconvenient STD. This is forever.
You see that’s the part of this that bugs me…you want to blame the sinner, fine. Have him take responsiblity fine. However, I’ve never gotten why it’s okay for his wife or his kids to die with him and that’s the end result of this. They’re not responsible for getting sick…and as irishgirl noted their culture doesn’t have as many ‘outs’ for women as Western ones do. The Church may be the only option for women to protect themselves…now that’s irony.
Innocent people whose only crime is have an unfaithful husband will die and that’s they way it’s supposedto be because someone has to pay for his sin.
I expect the Catholic Church to protect the lives of the innocent and if that means promoting Bricker’s explanation of why condom use is acceptable, while ignoring the other uses for it, so be it.
However the Church shouldn’t interfere with Health Organizations attempts to at least TRY to help or blame the victim by telling her, if her husband wasn’t a sinner; she wouldn’t be dying. “Your husband should’ve kept his pants on”, is poor comfort.
And isn’t providing comfort what the Church is about?
Yes.
You said “the Church is teaching that premarital and extramarital sex is wrong.” Can I have a “Duh”, from the audience? That is not the same thing as the need for proper sexe ducation.
Yes, “you moron”, to borrow a phrase from your OP. My grandfather worked at Los Alamos. I asked him about the morality of the fact that he could have sabotaged the bomb, to prevent such horrible overkill from happening. His answer was not, “It would have been against the law”, or “What do you expect, that I would go against the policies of my own country?”, not it was, “We didn’t know. We had no idea it would have this much effect on living things. Had we known, maybe we would have. We just wanted the war to end as quickly as possible.”
In other words, when a person realizes that the company he keeps is doing evil, it is his responsability to stop it.
Maybe as long as I am clear which forms of transmission I am talking about, we can agree to disagree. ISTM that various methods of transmission get lumped together as “heterosexual AIDS” a lot as furbilisa’s cite seemed to do.
I also don’t like to dismiss cites out of hand, especially not from Yale, but your PowerPoint slide seemed to assert that f-to-m transmission was just as likely as m-to-f. And it does not seem to me that the numbers bear this out.
If ftm were just as likely as the reverse, one would expect “heterosexually acquired AIDS” to be divided between males and females roughly fifty-fifty. This does not seem to be the case. Females are over-represented in this category. If you think about the mechanics of vaginal intercourse, it is clear that the exchange of fluids critical to HIV exposure is much greater from the male to the female than vice versa. Add to that the undoubted fact that the vagina is designed for intercourse where other orifices such as the rectum is not, so that the vagina is naturally lubricated, has its blood supply better separated from the mucosa, etc., and I think it is intuitively clear why it would be easier to get AIDS from mtf rather than the other way 'round. So I won’t go so far as to reject what the Yale slide show is saying, but I would be interested in knowing on what they base their assertion.
All quite true.
And yet, as you mention:
And I doubt it is sex education as regards latex condoms. There was a period of several years before it was known that latex condoms were effective (although not 100%) in preventing the transmission of HIV. And many other forms of contraception besides condoms are common in the heterosexual world - pills, IUDs, foams, vasectomy/tubal ligation, Norplant (for a while) - which do not prevent the spread of HIV. And yet AIDS did not make the cross over to becoming the “disease of everyone” they were proposing. And shows no sign of doing so today. A quick run thru of the figures from 2003 seem to indicate that more than 80% of AIDS diagnoses during that year are from male-to-male sexual contacts, IV drug abuse, or both. Historically, something like 90% fit into those categories, although it is possible that the disparity stems from the first years of the epidemic.
Probably true. But then the question remains, what are these factors, and how susceptible is the Catholic Church to blame for encouraging, or not attacking them?
The article you linked to earlier mentioned “dry sex” (ew!). It also mentioned what it said was a typical example, which was a miner who had condoms freely available, but chose not to use them with his wife, the widespread incidence of prostitution, rape and the sexual exploitation of women, and several other factors. And I find it hard to see how the Church can be blamed for any of these factors except one (“don’t use condoms”), and Bricker has already mentioned that the Catholic church does not object to using condoms to prevent the spread of disease. So perhaps not even that one.
Add to that that the Church already condemns rape, patronizing prostitutes, sexual promiscuity, and so forth, it seems a little harsh to me to put primary blame on the Catholic church for what seems a fairly minor factor in the spread of AIDS in Africa.
There I suspect we disagree. I am not Catholic, and don’t believe in their position on condoms. But I expect that they believe that, by condemning sexual immorality in all its aspects, they are actively campaigning to fight the spread of AIDS. If everyone were monogamous, no one ever hired a prostitute, no one abused IV drugs, and no one ever raped a woman, AIDS would be basically a non-issue, even if condom use were unheard of.
Perhaps the Church could have done things differently. Perhaps even it may have made some difference. But to say they are responsible for thousands of deaths among people who aren’t following their advice on anything else anyway seems a bit of an overstatement.
Regards,
Shodan
No, the solution is for people not to have sex. That is the solution. No goodness, badness, or moral judgment about it. And Badger, that “no good” thing was beneath you. The Church is NOT going to educate on how to use condoms properly because condoms are used almost entirely in activities that directly conflict with Church teachings. In fact, the Church is going to insist that its teachings be followed. Its teachings are, first and foremost: no premarital/extramarital sex. So, quite honestly, in the church’s eyes, the pro-condom set is not only promoting infidelity (by tacitly issuing approval of infidelity in saying, “if you’re going to…”), but also promoting sexual practices that are riskier than its own policies. The Church has, to its mind, statistics and morality on its side. They’re going to bend over backwards to facilitate or encourage a system that is, by all measures, worse than theirs? I doubt it.
holmes, it’s not OK to tell a victim that her condition is the result of someone else’s sin, and it is not OK to say “if your husband had kept his pants on…” However, the Church cannot condone sin in order to prevent tragedy. It’s a CHURCH.
Ummm… as far as “education” goes, the Church’s teaching with regard to AIDS transmission is that chastity offers the greatest chance of stopping AIDS, in addition to being wrong.
Can you refute this?
Then what you are saying is that it’s the responsibility of the hypothetical wife of an AIDS-infected fornicator to walk out on her husband or to not have sex with him? I think that many in this thread would disagree with that. And who says the Church is doing evil? You? I think that such a statement would also be met wiht a great deal of disagreement.
See, you have to be careful about making blanket statements.
Did Bricker not tell us that condom use is permitted to prevent disease within married couples? So then the Church has a method to promote protection, WITHIN marriage; without condoning sin. Right there, problem solved.
Why don’t they do that? That’s the question you need to ask yourself. If I have a method to allow you to live and operate within the confines of OUR beliefs and withhold that information from you, what does make me…honest or sinful?
If I am in a position of authority and withhold my knowlegde of law from you, do I not share some of the blame for your failure? Is a lie of omission, not still a lie? Even if in the past you have ignored SOME of my advice, does that relieve me of the burden of being honest with you now?
Is Bricker wrong in his opinion of condom use?